Another long break between posts and many personal excuses. Here’s not the place nor the time. However I will be going on a 160km (100 mile) charity walk with my brother and dog. My Just Giving page can be found under this link.

I’m now on my holidays in the UK, so I’ve been getting a bit of knitting done, and my roomie, Angela, asked for a hat for this winter.

I let her choose the pattern from my Ravelry queue thinking I’d use up some odd acrylic in my mum’s stash. But I didn’t filter the queue and unluckily for us she chose a 4ply pattern. I didn’t really mind, what’s another ball, so I agreed and went off to my mum’s. The first weekend here, while camping in Derbyshire, I cast this on. A week later it was finished and my brother took this awesome photos. The pattern is called Hermione’s Cable & Lace Hat and can be found on Ravelry here. It’s published on another blog but is free. There’s a wide variety of projects and much insperation for this on Raverly. I stuck with the original cream/white colour in the film this was based on, but not everyone did.

The yarn I used was from Hobby Craft, it cost £3 and it’s the Women’s Institute Premium Acrylic, I don’t dislike but I wouldn’t use it again. It made me think of Smoothie, by Patons, which is a DK weight, but the balls are very fragile and fall apart, this was 4ply, fell apart and got very, very tangled, texture wise, once knitted it was lovely. As a ball it was a pain in the ass. I did only use half of it though.

So what did I change in the pattern? Well, I cast on extra stitches because she said it might be small, I also worked an extra repeat to make it more slouchy because Angela prefers her hats like that. And I improvised the decreases because I wasn’t working from the pattern. These cables are good for a beginner who’s got the hang of decreasing and yarn overs. I do love it, and would probably do it again.